More than just silky elegant pyjamas
Original design was focused on elegance
Francesca Ruffini is a reluctant fashionista.
In her home in Como, northern Italy, she started making pyjamas that she wanted to wear, using the silk that the area is known for.
Allergic to everything but cotton and silk, and wanting to be comfortable day to day, “I made some special pieces for me, just for my personal daily wear. They’re useful, with elegance, that’s all. It’s not a fashion story”.
I’ll have to disagree with her there. Since the launch in 2015, Ruffini has taken pyjamas not only out of the bedroom, but out of the house altogether – it’s not unusual to see a pair of FRS (For Restless Sleepers, and also Ruffini’s monogram) pyjamas being worn out to dinner, to the theatre front row at a fashion show. OK, so perhaps they have been a little popular, Ruffini admits. “They became, for a few seasons, a kind of fashion. I was really surprised, and a little bit upset. It was a niche nobody was in, and now everybody seems to want to make pyjamas. Why?”
Because they looked so wonderful, of course, as the Italian style set wore them with jewelled sandals and oversized earrings to dinner – more effortless than a dress, more stylish than denim.
“It wasn’t such good news for me. This was my small little world in Como, with all my fabrics, all my prints, all my dreams, and when I saw all these very important designers making pyjamas in their collections … it started from there, and then they arrived in Zara.
“If I go into Zara, I can buy pyjamas nearly exactly like mine, €100, made I don’t know where.”
As a consumer, there’s an appeal in feeling a little bit undressed. “When I was a child, the first thing that I’d do when I got home – even if it was two o’clock in the afternoon – I’d change from my school clothes into pyjamas,” says Ruffini.
Her focus is on elegance. “Even if the model is very simple, if you use a super-rich silk, that’s a black tie, so haute couture fabric – so then nobody realises they’re pyjamas.”
The designs stem from classic masculine pyjamas, but they are cut “with obsession, because they must be comfortable, but at the same time, they must fit perfectly like women’s trousers”. Ruffini wears hers with a jumper and Vans when she’s travelling, and with a necklace to dinner. Lisa Armstrong, The Daily Telegraph’s fashion director, can often be seen at her desk wearing PJ trousers with a blazer, or the blouse tucked into navy cotton trousers. “In my mind, it’s always better to stay a little bit low profile than to show off. I never would come to a party dressed in couture,” says Ruffini.
“I’d prefer that during the party, somebody might just say, ‘oh, this is nice’. In my opinion it’s also how you wear your hair: I’ve always worn my hair in a banana, it’s like a chignon, since I was a 20-year-old girl. It was a little bit too old for me then, but now it’s perfect. I really hate [it] when women that are 50 and 70 dress like a girl who is 20, 25.
“For me, it makes no sense. They’re not at peace with themselves. I’m over 50, and I never wear something that’s shorter than midi.”
She admires Jacqueline Kennedy’s style as “she was always herself”, but thinks Melania Trump is dressing up as someone else.
“It’s not very natural. Why do you need a stylist? You can do it yourself with your taste, your personality.”
Ruffini’s own taste is more American than Italian, she says, as “Italian is a little bit more styled. It’s perfect, it’s always co-ordinated. If you wear the red shoes you must wear the red bag – no, it’s not my taste. Nobody ever needs to know that you are wearing a designer. They must recognise you in your dress because it’s your way of dressing”. The Daily Telegraph